Ali, Mandela and dreaming the impossible

This past Friday, Albany’s Palace Theater presented the HBO film “Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight,” dramatizing Ali’s 1971 battle with the government over refusing military induction because of his religious beliefs and opposition to the Vietnam War. Much of the film was shot in the Capital Region. A brief documentary featuring Albany’s Quail Street Boxing Gym preceded the showing.

It was right to open with the Quail Street piece. Area folks need to know about that Gym. Albany Department of Recreation Commissioner John D’Antonio, along with Coach Jerrick Jones and assistant Cory Landy, run the best youth development/delinquency prevention program in the City.

But it also meant that many Quail Street kids would be there to see the feature. Nelson Mandela died the day before and his remarkable life had undoubtedly been the topic of Friday classroom discussions. Now the kids would get the same life lesson, but from an American hero. And here’s the lesson: it’s often hard to stand for truth, but if you’re resolute and strong, and never lose faith, you will overcome.

“Impossible is nothing,” Muhammad used to say.

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Okay, I know, Ali is no Nelson Mandela. But in a way, he is to me. Mandela’s genius wasn’t only to unite Black South Africans, but to open the eyes of their oppressors, to eventually make brothers of strangers.

I was just another suburban white kid when Ali burst onto the scene an utter anomaly. In a sport where tradition dictated participants not speak unless it was monosyllabic, humble, and deferential, this guy proclaimed he was the greatest — relentlessly, loudly, and on television. He taunted Liston, the kind of puncher who would hit you on the shoulder and raise a welt on your toe. Clay was a 7-1 underdog and he didn’t care.

Then he won. I was hooked.

It was a time when a white kid could make it all the way to the army before ever meeting somebody from another race.

Then Clay converted to the Nation of Islam. For all I knew at the time, that was a middle-eastern country, and since Cassius Clay was unquestionably noble and good, I reasoned, he should be able to change his name and move there if he wanted. I was confused by the outrage of the adults around me. He was my hero.

Only later did I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X and learned what comes from subjugating a people for a few hundred years, and of the motivation behind Ali’s principled and brave decision. But it took a fighter, a person I loved to pull me in and invite enough benefit of the doubt to open my ears.

Cultural anthropologists tell us that religion is a people’s way of explaining the world to itself, and that we look at God and the world through the lens of a shared cultural experience, which is why, for instance, Christianity doesn’t look like Buddhism. Viewed this way, the NOI wasn’t only possible; it was inevitable.

When Malcolm stood on a Harlem stoop, people put down their lunch boxes and listened because his words resonated with their lives as nothing had before.

Yes, Ali was from Louisville’s middle class and, compared to Liston or Frazier, didn’t encounter a scintilla of the racism they did, but he knew. All African-Americans knew, long before whites were even awake. For Blacks the cost of speaking out had meant harassment, loss of jobs or, if it became too threatening, “Strange Fruit,” as the Billie Holiday song graphically describes.

“No Vietnamese ever called me nigger,” Ali said. There is no way to convey to kids today how those words stunned white America. In 1967, refusing to accept induction was anathema. So society struck back. After all, it wasn’t like the NOI was, you know, a real religion.

Critics claim that unlike Mandela whose voice was unifying, Ali drove us apart. But this is wrong. Whites began to see a leader in the Rorschach test that was Ali, and we liked where he was taking us. Essayist and culture critic Gerald Early observed the same about Jackie Robinson’s unifying force: “For each group it was important that he was a hero to the other.”

Afrikaners likely experienced Mandela in the same way, encountering a new and strange compulsion to allow him entry into a previously “whites only” place in their hearts.

So it was with Ali.

I was an infantry officer in 1971, the year of Clay v. United States. I felt the same opposition to the war that he did, but lacked his courage. Although the government has long denied it, NOI sources reported that he was offered a deal to serve without seeing action. He could have served as Joe Louis did in World War II, putting on exhibitions. Yet Ali chose instead to face incarceration, and to sacrifice his career if necessary, along with wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, all in service of the truth.

Only later did other notables jump aboard the peace train.

Within a few years it had become practically a parlor game to guess the next celebrity who would come out against the war. Eventually, even Lyndon Johnson, back on his Texas ranch, let his hair grow in what some aides say was a subconscious desire for solidarity with those he had so alienated.

But Ali went first. He soon distanced himself from the NOI in favor of mainstream Islam that he practices to this day.

Anyway, I’m grateful to my hero, and thought I’d write this now, while he’s still with us. In time, he too will recede into history. But I hope last Friday’s film spoke to the kids from the Albany Gym, and that they’ll learn from my hero the power of dreaming Ali-size, Mandela-size.